This is the slowest moving horror story I have ever read. It’s not that slow to start- the odd things begin fairly early on. But the events drag horribly- much of the book is spent in denial of what is happening. Worse, none of the characters is very likeable. Not that they are dreadful people; they are just people I couldn’t care about. Even the protagonist, who I feared for at first, is portrayed too flatly to seem real. One character, who it seems like will be important to the protagonist’s development, just disappears halfway through the story and we never know what finally happened to her. The story is frustrating, more than anything. Even the end seems a cheat; a Deus ex machina appears to take care of the monster. Ultimately, it doesn’t really, but we’re still left to wonder what the deus ex machina was and why it intervened. This is a poor novel that might have been a good short story or novella. ( )